Two Egyptian Islamist leaders refused to call the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) a terrorist group, in an interview with Al-Monitor. Yusri Hamad, the vice president of the Salafist National Party, expressed his refusal to describe ISIL as an extremist or terrorist group, since he does not know its ideology and has not read much about it. "Perhaps some Iraqis, from within IS components, were tortured, which means IS does not represent jihadist groups. Many IS members joined the group as a reaction to the torture they endured under [Nouri] al-Maliki's government or the US occupation," he said. Hamad condemned US interference in the region and considered it to be an attempt to create a new reality and overlook the massacres it is committing. "Why are they fighting ISIL but not President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi? Why are they fighting ISIL but not the Houthis?" he asked angrily. Hamad was surprised by the media wave against IS, since it did not mention the massacres committed by the US invasion against Iraq and the massacres against Muslims in several areas, like Burma and Central Africa. Vice president of the Arab relations committee at the Salafist National Party, Yahi al-Safi Saadallah, agreed with Hamad that ISIL was a mutual US-Iranian-Syrian creation. He linked the coalition's inability to eliminate IS, despite the group's primitive weapons, as an attempt to create division in the region.
